How design duo Isabel + Helen explore movement, materials and mechanisms in art
There’s something soothing about watching Isabel + Helen’s handmade contraptions create what the London-based design duo call “imperfect perfect circles”. The soft bristles of the brush. The gentle speed of the rotation platform. The way the paint thins and thickens. It’s like peering into a kaleidoscope, except the infinitely reflected chintzy pattern has been replaced with simple, sweeping curves, often in a single colour, from greenish yellow and dusty lavender to a cloudless sky blue. A new exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, on until 5th September, brings together a series of these mesmerising paintings and the means of their creation.
Isabel Gibson and Helen Chesner met while studying at Chelsea College of Art in 2009, and soon discovered their shared love of analogue design and lowkey kinetics. They began collaborating not long after they graduated and three years later co-founded their eponymous creative studio, which produces timeless animated installations that blur the boundary between art and design. Since then, they’ve produced playful sculptures, window displays and retail concepts for fashion brands and cultural institutions from Craig Green, Stella McCartney and Bottega Veneta to Adidas, RIBA and Tate Modern.
Movement, materials, mechanisms. The exploration of all three underpins everything Isabel + Helen do. They place equal emphasis on process and product – hence the appeal of this series of tonal paintings, which they started in 2018. It’s as much about how things move and work – from assembling and activating the machines to mark-making and the revelation of the paintings – as it is about the finished product. Paint-laden brushes are attached to a wooden frame in various configurations, then lowered onto a rotating sheet of paper. The contraptions themselves are cobbled together from industrial and everyday objects such as whisks and fans. The project, which looks and sounds deceptively simple, brings together machines and the human hand in a hypnotic, calming performance.
Isabel + Helen take complex ideas and make them legible. The repetitive motion of one or more brushes moving across a blank page nods to the limbo-like times we’ve been living in over the past couple of years, while the act of rotation reflects the turning of our planet. In their work, the duo embrace contrasts: plainness and detail, uniformity and variation, light and dark. Though the resulting “imperfect perfect circles” vary in thickness and hue, each one different from the next, they’re never-ending. Isabel + Helen have committed to paper the concept of a unified and everlasting nature; within the transformation from raw materials to colourful concentric circles, there’s hope.
Isabel + Helen: In Orbit is at the Saatchi Gallery from 13 August until 5 September 2021
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